Realm Works campaign manager

[Grey Mage]

The people over at Lone Wolf Development (who do Hero Lab) have the beta out now for their campaign manager: Realm Works. Even in beta it is pretty amazing! They are interested in partnering with one (or more) VTT developers to integrate an existing VTT into RW.

This was posted by one of their senior developers on the RW forum:

We definitely want to integrate with existing VTT software in the future rather than building those features ourselves. However, which VTT vendors we will support is not finalized. In most cases, support is going to depend on two things: time on our part and time/willingness on their part.

If you want a particular company or 3rd party product supported with Realm Works, make sure you let them know (nicely ). That will help enormously on the "willingness" side of the equation at least.

Since everyone knows that FG2 is the best VTT around, I was wondering if the developers would be interested in such an opportunity?

[Moon Wizard]

It is something that we have talked about in the past and again at Gencon this year. We have not initiated anything with Lone Wolf beyond the Hero Lab integration at this point. I don't have the bandwidth currently to assess its features, and determine how it might fit with FG. That will probably have to be a project undertaken after the v3.0 release.

What is the current release date estimate? Can you give an overview of the data in RealmWorks and how it would map to current FG campaign records?

Note: In most situations, moving data from one system to another is "much" easier if it is only one-way. So, think about how you might want to "import" Realm Works data into your FG campaign, and whether how it might be created new each time or replace existing data. (i.e. like the character import feature from Hero Lab).

Regards,
JPG

[Grey Mage]

JPG,

Currently they are shooting for a v1.0 release in Oct/Nov.

As for an overview of the data in RW, basically everything. It allows the GM to have all of the relevant data for an entire campaign in one place. NPCs, locations, rules mechanics (think crunchy data such as spells, feats, classes, etc.), timelines, maps, character images, PDFs pertaining to campaign, web links, etc.

Once this data is in RW, the GM can share/show it to the players via browser. This is done by toggling viewability (per each 'snippet' of information!!) so that when a player encounters an NPC, the GM can toggle on his Name, Race, Gender, etc., while keeping other information hidden/unrevealed (an example might be that the local merchant Gander Smithson, revealed: human, male, apparently 55 years of age is also the leader of the local assassin's guild... which would be unrevealed until they discovered that fact). This feature is called by LWD the 'Fog of World' and prevades the entire structure of RW. It extends to every aspect of the program including maps. As players explore the game world, the GM can continuously reveal/update the player's shared map. The same holds true for a city or even a dungeon.

Maps in RW can be pinned with data entries so that when you see a pin, you click on it, jump to the entry it is linked to and then with a single click also reveal it to the players.

HeroLab integration is already built into RW. You can store HL portfolios for individual PC/NPCs as well as groups/encounters.

As to how an FG2/RW integration might work, what I would most like to see is a button in RW that opens up my FG2 desktop. Dream upon a dream integration would allow the 'player view' option of data sharing to open a window in FG2. This type viewing would be the easy 'one way' you mentioned. If PC/NPC info in FG2 and 'story content' could be stored in RW and then opened in FG2, even more of a dream.

There are a ton of other features I have yet to explore fully: story boarding, cloud based sharing of realms content, etc. so if there would be any interest I would recommend checking out this link:

https://www.wolflair.com/index.php?context=realm_works

And then perhaps the brainy types at SmiteWorks could talk with their counterparts at LWD.